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towards the hillside. Nothing wrong with it, according to the tow truck driver. Diane began to walk in serpentines up the slope, her eyes on the ground. He followed her with reluctance.
    “Have you tried her phone?” Diane asked over her shoulder.
    John looked at her with exasperation. Of course he’d tried her phone.
    “Try again, if she’s anywhere close we might hear it.”
    He stuck his hand in his pocket, stopped by her soft exclamation of surprise. She sank to her knees beside a large outcropping of stone.
    “What?” John scrambled in his haste.
    “It’s still red Converse, isn’t it?” Diane used a stick to lift something off the ground and turned to face him. The blood drained away from his head so fast it left him dizzy: one burnt red Converse, the sole a melted mass, the canvas black from toe cap to heel.
    “Oh God,” he said, his voice shaking.
    “It could be someone else’s,” Diane said. “We don’t know that it’s hers.”
    He nodded, avoiding her concerned eyes. It was Alex’s, and whatever had happened to her must have been pretty awful to leave her shoe so badly burnt.
    “Can lightning do that to you?” he said.
    She shrugged in an I-don’t-know gesture. “I’ve heard of people being killed by lightning, but I’ve never heard of someone being obliterated by it.”
    He held the shoe gingerly, staring at it in an attempt to find a connection to Alex. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough, the shoe would feed him some kind of image. He heard himself how ludicrous that sounded. Not even Mercedes, Alex’s long gone mother, would have believed in something that silly. Or maybe she would, he shuddered, remembering a night several years ago when Mercedes had been well into her cups.
    Very strange, was Mercedes, an intense woman who mostly seemed to paint – weird pictures heaving with contained colours. A small canvas signed by Mercedes hung by their bed, and he generally avoided looking at it, feeling a disquieting tug in the pit of his stomach when he got too close. Mercedes had disappeared three years ago, coincidentally the same day Alex resurfaced after three months of unexplained absence in Italy. And now…he bit down on his lip.
    “What?” Diane said.
    “I was just thinking…poor Magnus, hey?”
    “Yeah,” Diane sighed and looked away. “Poor, poor Magnus. First his wife, then his daughter.”
    “He knew.” John chucked the shoe to the side.
    “Who knew what?” Diane sounded confused.
    “Him: Sanderson. He knew about Mercedes having disappeared. He said so, just before he…well…oh God…” John pressed his hands flat against his legs to contain the trembling that surged through him. People just don’t evaporate into nothingness, he reminded himself, there’s always a logical explanation. In Mercedes’ case maybe her brain caved in, making her throw herself off some crag or other. And in Alex’s case – well, he had no idea.
    “He did?” Diane shrugged. “Not that strange, is it? It was all over the papers for a couple of weeks.”
    John’s phone beeped and he pulled it out, his heart lurching when he saw the sender ID.
    “From her,” he said and opened the text. “ In the cave. A .” He stumbled to his feet. “There’s a cave, somewhere here there’s a cave.” Maybe she was hurt, her foot burnt off her, and if he didn’t find her she’d die of exposure and thirst and gangrene or something.
    Diane looked at him as if he’d gone mad, but stood up and began to beat her way up the increasingly steeper inclination. Flies buzzed, clouds of butterflies rose disturbed as they waded through the gorse and heather.
    It was well into the afternoon before John found the opening, almost invisible behind a creeper of some kind. Diane came over to join him and they peered into the gloom.
    “No one’s been here recently,” Diane said.
    John agreed, pushing his way into the small, enclosed space. It smelled of damp and a vague scent of mulch. Heaped debris,